Articles tagged with: mortgages

“Under current law, banks with more than $50 billion in assets are considered ‘systemically important financial institutions’ and therefore are subject to extra scrutiny. The Senate bill would lift that threshold to $250 billion, relaxing oversight of 25 of the 38 largest banks in the country. According to Americans for Financial Reform, those banks are collectively responsible for $3.5 trillion in assets and received nearly $50 billion in bailout money during the financial crisis.”

“This bill would undermine already vulnerable homeowners by stripping away protections created by Congress and implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). These protections were put in place for a reason: to give manufactured-homeowners the same protections as traditional homeowners.”

“The package includes legislation that would release the nation’s largest banks from measures to prevent a financial crisis, saving them billions of dollars in expenses,” AFR’s Lisa Donner said. “It would also allow banks and fintech firms to cooperate in new forms of payday lending, and make investment products riskier for mom-and-pop savers. And it’s all happening against the backdrop of a big proposed tax cut for Wall Street.”

“[T]he Senate cabal has masked their handout by claiming to focus on relief for small community banks… [But] the proposal ‘includes over a dozen measures that would ease rules on banks, and a few minor changes for consumers that ought to be a given,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, the main pro-regulatory advocacy group in D.C.”

A look back at the financial lobby’s robotic opposition to one proposed reform after another, and how Wall Street’s claims have squared with real-world events. This new AFR report homes in on three pre-financial-crisis case studies, involving credit cards, mortgages, and derivatives.